I can't make myself love this
Brittany Nelson at PATRON
Kramer: Do you ever yearn?
Costanza: Yearn? Do I yearn?
Kramer: I yearn.
Costanza: You yearn.
Kramer: Oh, yes. Yes, I yearn. Often, I... I sit... and yearn. Have you yearned?
Costanza: Well, not recently. I craved. I crave all the time, constant craving... but I haven't yearned.
What do Andrei Tarkovsky’s Solaris, Bonnie Raitt’s 1991 hit, I Can’t Make You Love Me, and letters between sci-fi writers Ursula K. Le Guin and James Tiptree Jr. all share in common? Obvious differences aside, each expresses an unfathomable longing that surfaces from a fruitless search for companionship. And it is from an inability to express this same sentiment on its own that I can’t make you love me, Brittany Nelson’s current solo exhibition at PATRON seems to suffer from most.
Everything in this exhibition appears flawless, but seldom do any of the formal machinations go beyond that. everything but the signature is me; an automatic typewriter programmed by Nelson taps out “Starbear,” Tiptree’s doting hypocorism for Le Guin, at coordinates on the page where the appellation occurred in life. The machine owes its title to a specific note where Tiptree makes an admission to Le Guin that they were in fact the pseudonymous personage of Alice Bradley Sheldon.
It is enchanting to see the hammers spring to life, tapping out “Starbear” at such seemingly random intervals and spaces across the page. The metallic clicks of the typewriter stalk the audience in intervals of silence between bouts of Bonnie Raitt that echo from the rear.
Once I got past my admiration for the technical precision and depth of research needed to produce the work, something felt off. By mechanically reproducing a term of endearment at a regular pace, everything but the signature is me, vacates “Starbear” of the singularity inherent to such a name. The effect leaves audiences with something like a self-equal, reproducible identity where a person used to be. It may as well be a rubber stamp in the hand of a notary. Gone is the ατοπία (atopia) found in the term of endearment; in its stead, there is an illusion—an image of longing that the typewriter corrupts into a craven obsession. If anything, this deflationary action is a reminder that the automation of sentiment is a prerequisite for a paltry form of life robbed of eros and replaced by a perfunctory sameness.
Starbear and Mars Clouds 1–3, on the other hand, come close to resuscitating a semblance of desire from what otherwise is a collection of rhetorical nods in its speculative direction. Nelson has created a series of diptychs including contact prints of Tiptree’s letters while disappearing all words but “Starbear.” Here an audience will find Tiptree's term of endearment returning to its proper place: as a form of haptic interaction in spite of distance. What is a name if not a way to facilitate touch without physically initiating it?
Photograms of the letters are each paired with a photograph of the Martian sky. But the sky might as well be anywhere; the fact that it’s Mars doesn't matter beyond the mildly amusing injection of hyperbole it offers. What does matter is that they effectively reproduce the feeling of knowing you are in one place and that some singular someone else is somewhere else; that rootedness is constituent to longing.
There are also three panoramic, silver-gelatin prints from screenshots of Andrei Tarkovsky’s 1972 film, Solaris, which occupy the opposite wall. They look sharp, and I am desperate to know how Nelson managed to continue the image onto the spacers in the frame. Solaris Ocean 1 and Solaris Ocean 2, as well as Solaris Window, re-present the liquid intelligence of the planet that, much like Capital, presents cosmonaut Kris Kelvin with living images of his own desires in place of anything truly different. Despite the considerable abstraction induced by inflating their grain content or Nelson’s selection of some of the film’s more indeterminate imagery, they are overly indebted to their source and reflect their source's discourse more so than Nelson’s own intentions.
Likewise, I can’t make you love me, a video in the very back of the gallery, starts off strong by playing the eponymous Bonnie Raitt ballad over teasing footage of a telescope array used to look out for alien intelligence. The slow, methodically searching sweeps of a flashlight counterposed against a satellite field's massive infrastructure begin as a tender demonstration of the human desire to look for even minor connections at a universal scale. Unfortunately, it quickly overstays its welcome, getting a bit too cloying on top of the song being replayed later as a vaporwave mix for no apparent reason.
While all erotic encounters require ἐπιθυμία (epithumia), or desire, they also necessitate θυμός (thumos), or courage. It takes courage to admit you cannot make anyone love you or to tell the truth to someone you hold dear despite the consequences. The desire to find someone else like oneself—or worse, someone who conforms to the very contours of our imagination—is perhaps the cornerstone of a bourgeois conception of romantic relations.
Courage displaces wantonness, metamorphosing a love-like-a-mirror into a love-like-a-window that might frame the singular and eternally different Other. Unfortunately, all Nelson seems capable of giving, save for a few passing moments, is to hold up a mirror to her references. To be sure, Nelson’s grasp on the technical rigors of photography’s most arcane processes is unimpeachable, and her previous exhibition at Patron—about the dying days of the Mars Rover—came close to breaking my heart.
I can’t make you love me frustratingly conflates objects demonstrating the acuity of longing with the capacity to do the same by reference alone. Affects are ends, not means, and it is in misconstruing them as such that the exhibition veers off course.
A gorgeous, empty package might stave off disappointment before it is opened, but it doesn’t change the fact that it’s empty inside.
